The Honey-Laundry-Peanut Butter Connection

This all started when my son peed the bed.

He's two years old. These things happen. But throwing his laundry in the wash the next morning (he slept the rest of the night with us. I couldn't be bothered with 3 am laundry.), the sun was out, the birds were chirping, and I thought it was high-time to get out the clothesline.

I love hanging clothes on the line to dry. I love the rhythm of it - reach, shake, hang, clip, clip; reach, shake, hang, clip, clip; reach, shake, hang, clip, clip. I love the look of it, gazing out my back window and seeing those colors waving in the breeze. I love the energy efficiency of it and lately, I've been thinking more and more about the health benefits of it.

The other day, I was talking about kids and allergies with another parent. She told me a trick her sister swears by: to battle allergies, eat local honey. Something about the bees, the pollen, and how consuming honey exposes your body to all those local plants and helps your body develop immunity against them. I'm not a doctor and frankly science hasn't proven it, but lots of people swear by it. Call it the placebo effect, call it what you will, but maybe there's something to it.

I apply the same theory to child rearing, our laundry and our diet. With allergy sensitivity doubling in the past 30 years, and kids increasingly being affected, I let Ben play in the mud. I make sure he interacts with lots of furry animals. To be honest, I've caught him eating dirt a few times and didn't think it was a big deal. Instead of sheltering the poor kid, I try to get him outside and exposed to lots of different things.

When it comes to laundry, I figure letting our clothes air outside picks up little tiny bits of pollen and whatever else may be floating in the air and I'm glad of it, since a perfectly sterile world is no world at all. Plus, it's just so cute to see all of little Ben's tiny jeans lined up out there. Granted, if you already have allergies like my neighbors, drying laundry outside is a sure way to start a terrible day. But doesn't it make you wonder if all those dryer sheets and lack of exposure outdoors cause some of our allergy problems?

When it comes to food, variety is the name of my shopping game. Instead of constantly buying peanut butter, I'll mix it up with almond butter, apple butter, or my favorite North Dakota-made Sunbutter, made with sunflower seeds. Us North Dakotans are blessed to live in the bread basket of America, but instead of just wheat flour and pasta all the time, sometimes I'll pick up rice noodles, teff flour, quinoa, barley, anything different.

I'm no doctor, but I think there may be something to all this.  Or I could be a complete whack job. What do you think? Better yet, I probably don't want to know if you think I'm nutso. But I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about all this. However, even if I found out tomorrow that my honey-laundry-peanut butter connection was just bunk, I probably wouldn't change a darn thing and you'll still find me in the backyard, hanging the wash.